The Job of Your First Customer and Some (More) Love for Delta 4

I chatted with a friend of a friend of the program yesterday about her idea.

She’s working on a business to help people find skilled tradespeople. The high-level idea is that we have groups of people we trust (family, a close circle of friends, possibly coworkers) but don’t fully leverage.

So, the use case is if I move to a new house and want to find a plumber or a painter or landscaper or someone to put in a water softener, I could look at the tradespeople my trusted group had used. I could also ping the group for specific suggestions. Over time, this trusted network would expand, offering a more personalized and reliable alternative to platforms like Yelp.

I asked how traction was going and she said it was tough. Everyone was interested and said they loved it, but traction didn’t equal the praise people were giving her.

And now we get to the job of your first customer, and Delta 4.

Your first customer is unlike any other customer you’ll ever have. They won’t be influenced by anything but you. Which is tricky, since people make 99% of their decisions based on envy — you look at someone you admire and make the decisions they’ve already made.

For this customer to take a flier on you, you need two things to be true.

1) Their current options for solving the problem have to SUCK.

The options can’t be mediocre or likely even “pretty bad.” They have to be a 2, 3, or 4 out of 10.

This is where you stack the deck in your favor. You only deal with people who are in serious trouble — they are in a hole they need to get out of, or they’re stuck doing a process they despise. You throw them a rope (hole problem), or you help them skip the hardest step (teleporter problem).

These only work if the founder’s in a hole and they’re happy to overpay you for a rope, or if they’re happy to overpay you to remove a hard part of the process.

This gets back to Delta 4.

Your first product needs to be a Delta 4 improvement to get someone to overpay for it. Previous process was a 3/10, you give them a 7/10, they pay for it, they tell people about it, they never switch off it. And you have a business.

Without a Delta 4 level improvement, potential customers are unlikely to take the leap. I love 2/10 → 6/10.

2) You have to be able to build trust fast.

Even if you find people in a 2/10 scenario, you still need to build some trust so that they try your 6/10 solution. That comes from specificity.

If a new, small business is terrified about screwing up their taxes and you say “taxes suck — we make them not suck,” you might think you’re clever, but that doesn’t build any trust. What would build trust is saying “new businesses stress about screwing up taxes their first year — we set up your LLC or S Corp filings and find all the stuff you missed,” or whatever.

The sequence for growth is clear.

1. Find a customer with a 2, 3, 4 out of 10.

2. Talk specifically to them to build trust.

3. Help them be wildly successful (deliver on Delta 4, even if the product is duct tape and bubblegum)

4. They tell everyone and their brother (people ALWAYS talk about Delta 4 products) ,and you kick off the “envy” portion of growth. You outsource your marketing to your first customer.

So, back to our friend.

There will be lots of people who say they want products that give them a delta 2 or 3 increase. But they won’t convert. These are confusing mixed signals as an entrepreneur, and you can’t always predict them. But once you see them through a mismatch in what people say they’ll do and what they actually do, the job is to zoom in.

Find someone who’s current tradesperson situation is a 2/10. For whatever reason, it’s a disaster. It’s a frequent problem, it’s an urgent problem, it’s painful, expensive, and possibly growing. Maybe they decided to buy a fixer upper on a whim. Maybe they moved to a town where they know no one. Whatever it is.

Focus solely on them to get the jumpstart. Then, expand.

Customers that get a Delta 2 improvement from your product will eventually be customers. They just won’t be the first customers. They need to see someone else get a Delta 4 first.

So…does your first customer have a 2, 3, 4 / 10 problem?